Today, while preparing notes for an upcoming presentation, “Publishing and Marketing Your Fiction”, I reflected on past experiences as both an attendee and a speaker at workshops and conferences. So often the topics that draw an audience of writers pertain to finding an agent, signing with a publisher, marketing to the masses, achieving literary stardom, etc. Presentations on improving writing technique just don’t offer the same glamour or promise of fame and fortune. Next week I plan to give my audience at Lone Star College practical information on the business of getting published—tips on query letters, loglines and pitches, press kits, online promotions, and in-store signings. Glamour and fortune I can only talk about theoretically. A slight pressure is also on me to deliver my information succinctly at the outset of the talk, which will be filmed for the college TV station. Then I hope to open up discussion with the other writers and aspiring writers on the passions that compel us.
Before the immeasurable thrill of receiving a publishing contract—followed by the careful work of reviewing edits, rewriting, and proofing—and before the joy of holding the finished book in your hands—followed by the endless job of book promotion, comes the writing, itself. In the years leading up to my first productions and publications as a playwright and novelist, I asked myself: “If you knew for certain that your work would never, ever sell, would you still write?” “Yes,” I answered. (Even without hope, I hope.) While elated by publication, production, recognition, and reviews, I find the deepest satisfaction in the act of creating a fictional world.
Still, writing is hard for me and time-consuming, and the success of it, however that success may be measured, is uncertain. For those who hope to be published, I can share from experience that it is important to study craft, behave with professionalism, adapt to changing technologies and markets, and be very patient with yourself and others. Agents may or may not make dreams come true—sometimes they shop a manuscript to the few big houses and, if it doesn’t sell to one of those, lose interest in it. Editors may love books, but they may also change publishing houses or leave the business, and the books they love are sometimes left orphaned and unpublished. Rejection letters arrive, and you may find it hard to keep saying yes to your writing while others say no. But writers persevere, and sometimes something wonderful happens. For me, that something turned out to be a contract with Kunati Inc., a young, innovative independent publisher, who matches creative writing with creative marketing. How we reach readers and audiences keeps changing, while storytelling and hope endure.
Rosemary Poole-Carter
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Bigotry Revisited
Ten years ago in Jasper, Texas, before dawn on June 7, 1998, three white men chained a black man to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him three miles to his death. This morning, the Houston Chronicle revisited the murder of James Byrd Jr. in a front-page story. The victim’s killers have been tried and sentenced, two assigned to death row and one to life in prison. Bloodstained evidence of the crime—the truck’s tires and rims and the heavy chain—is locked away in a security vault. The gray pickup rusts in an impound lot. Byrd’s family continues mourning his loss and cherishing his memory.
It horrifies me to type the words describing the murder, let alone to imagine the cruelty and agony of that night. Today I remember the shock I felt ten years ago when learning of this vicious killing in East Texas. As a writer of historical novels and plays set in the 19th century South, I have read and researched heartbreaking accounts of bondage and violence. I wanted to believe it was history. Then came this gruesome reminder of how bigotry persists, like an endemic disease.
Not long ago, I viewed a Civil War battle re-enactment in the piney woods of East Texas, an event interesting from a researcher’s and writer’s point of view. For many onlookers, it was a brief glimpse of history, of the camp life and battlefields of long ago. But the number of whites wearing t-shirts and caps emblazoned with the Confederate stars and bars and the volume of their cheers when gray trampled blue gave me pause.
I strive to keep an open mind, to keep prejudices in check, to understand that we are all shaped in various ways by our upbringing, always stopping short of condoning violence. Then, occasionally a new acquaintance, learning that I write, falls into a little pre-judging of me, assuming the imagination of a soft-spoken Southern white woman must run to romanticized tales of plantation mansions. But I refuse to forget who lived in the quarters. For that reason, I am drawn to the Southern gothic, to exploring that contradictory world of graciousness and greed, of compassion and suffering.
Included in Leslie Casimir’s Chronicle story about Jasper, Texas, are descriptions of the community today, of an alliance between black and white ministers, of interracial couples and offspring, of small-town poverty and glimmers of hope. In a way, it is a hopeful sign that ten years after the murder of James Byrd Jr., the crime retains its power to shock, and the murder weapon—a chain—is labeled infamous. Maya Angelou said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” It is heartening to hear of courage in Jasper.
Rosemary Poole-Carter
It horrifies me to type the words describing the murder, let alone to imagine the cruelty and agony of that night. Today I remember the shock I felt ten years ago when learning of this vicious killing in East Texas. As a writer of historical novels and plays set in the 19th century South, I have read and researched heartbreaking accounts of bondage and violence. I wanted to believe it was history. Then came this gruesome reminder of how bigotry persists, like an endemic disease.
Not long ago, I viewed a Civil War battle re-enactment in the piney woods of East Texas, an event interesting from a researcher’s and writer’s point of view. For many onlookers, it was a brief glimpse of history, of the camp life and battlefields of long ago. But the number of whites wearing t-shirts and caps emblazoned with the Confederate stars and bars and the volume of their cheers when gray trampled blue gave me pause.
I strive to keep an open mind, to keep prejudices in check, to understand that we are all shaped in various ways by our upbringing, always stopping short of condoning violence. Then, occasionally a new acquaintance, learning that I write, falls into a little pre-judging of me, assuming the imagination of a soft-spoken Southern white woman must run to romanticized tales of plantation mansions. But I refuse to forget who lived in the quarters. For that reason, I am drawn to the Southern gothic, to exploring that contradictory world of graciousness and greed, of compassion and suffering.
Included in Leslie Casimir’s Chronicle story about Jasper, Texas, are descriptions of the community today, of an alliance between black and white ministers, of interracial couples and offspring, of small-town poverty and glimmers of hope. In a way, it is a hopeful sign that ten years after the murder of James Byrd Jr., the crime retains its power to shock, and the murder weapon—a chain—is labeled infamous. Maya Angelou said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” It is heartening to hear of courage in Jasper.
Rosemary Poole-Carter
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